Persecuting Believers Doesn’t Protect Anyone’s Civil Rights

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text](Investor’s Business Daily) Hysteria over Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act has drowned out one critical question: Who are the florist and baker that ABC’s George Stephanopoulos hounded Gov. Mike Pence about?

When Americans learn what that florist and baker are threatened with, we face an emerging trend that will destroy companies and jobs, and the chilling specter of what sort of a nation we are becoming.

[/vc_column_text][banner300 banner=”5517620b381df”][vc_column_text]The florist is 70-year-old grandmother Baronelle Stutzman of Washington state. A longtime gay customer — with whom she had a warm relationship — wanted her to do flower arrangements for his gay wedding.

Mrs. Stutzman, a Southern Baptist, explained her Christian belief that marriage is between a man and woman, and thus could not participate in a gay wedding. Washington’s attorney general prosecuted her, pursuing not only her business but also Mrs. Stutzman personally. A state judge has ruled against her, and she faces the loss of her life’s savings and even her home.

The baker is Jack Phillips, who owns Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado. When he declined two gay men’s order to bake a cake celebrating gay marriage (though the men were welcome to buy any of the premade cakes off the shelf), they officially complained that Mr. Phillips violated Colorado’s civil-rights law.

A court ruled against him, ordering him and his employees to undergo government-approved “tolerance training,” and also ordering him to bake cakes celebrating gay marriage for anyone who asks. If he refuses, he can go to jail — put behind bars — for contempt of court.

There are others. First was a New Mexico photographer who did not want to do the wedding shoot for a gay-commitment ceremony — not a wedding — because New Mexico had neither gay marriage nor civil unions at the time.

A Kentucky T-shirt maker is being sued for not making shirts celebrating a gay-rights event. An Idaho pastor couple was pursued for not actually performing a gay wedding. The list goes on, and grows monthly.

Secularists on the left have vehemently opposed all religious freedom acts (RFRAs) since at least the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby case in 2014. The justices held that Hobby Lobby — a corporation owned by a devout Christian family — could assert religious-liberty rights as an extension of its Christian owners.